Billionaire Bhartias’ Coca-Cola bottler plans $1bn India IPO

Hindustan Coca-Cola Holdings, the Indian bottling business that billionaire brothers Shyam and Hari Bhartia bought into last year, is preparing to file draft papers this week for an initial public offering of about $1 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

The draft red herring prospectus is expected to be filed with the Securities and Exchange Board of India as early as Oct. 29. The offering could value the company at about $10 billion and is expected to be made up largely of existing shares sold by its owners, so most of the money would go to the selling shareholders rather than the company. The listing is planned for 2027 on the BSE and the National Stock Exchange of India, subject to market conditions and approvals.

The Coca-Cola Co. owns 60% of the holding company. The other 40% belongs to the Jubilant Bhartia Group, the New Delhi conglomerate run by the Bhartia brothers, which completed the purchase of its stake in July 2025. The size of each shareholder’s sale has not been made public. Coca-Cola has said it will remain an investor after the listing.

A bet on India’s biggest Coke bottler

Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages, the operating company under the holding firm, is Coca-Cola’s largest bottler in India. Set up in 1997, it makes and distributes Coca-Cola, Thums Up, Sprite, Fanta, Limca and Maaza from 14 bottling plants in 10 states, works with eight contract packers and sells to more than 1.7 million retailers through over 2,000 distributors. It employs about 5,000 people.

Jubilant Beverages, a unit of the Bhartias’ group, agreed in December 2024 to buy the 40% stake. The deal was valued at about $1.5 billion, and Goldman Sachs Asset Management provided $600 million of the equity funding through convertible preference shares. At the valuation now being discussed, the Bhartias’ stake would be worth about $4 billion.

The bottler’s revenue fell 9% to 127.5 billion rupees ($1.32 billion) in the year to March 2025, and net profit dropped 73% to 7.57 billion rupees ($78 million), according to filings with India’s Registrar of Companies. The decline followed the transfer of plants in some regions to independent bottlers, part of Coca-Cola’s long-running plan to sell bottling operations to local partners. Profit in the previous year had been lifted by one-time gains from those sales.

Coca-Cola said in June that it had begun preparations for a possible listing and described the move as a way to complete the refranchising of the business. It has hired Rothschild & Co. as an adviser. Axis Capital and IIFL Capital Services have joined Kotak Mahindra Capital, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley on the deal.

From pharmaceuticals to pizza

Shyam Bhartia, the group’s chairman, and his brother Hari Bhartia, its co-chairman, founded the business in 1978 and built it into a conglomerate that spans pharmaceuticals, life-science chemicals, food services and agriculture. Their best-known consumer business is Jubilant FoodWorks, which runs Domino’s Pizza restaurants in India and also owns the Popeyes franchise in the country. The brothers also control listed drugmaker Jubilant Pharmova and chemicals maker Jubilant Ingrevia.

Four Jubilant nominees joined the bottler’s board after the acquisition closed.

The planned listing would add to a busy run for India’s equity market. Companies raised close to $10 billion in initial public offerings in the July-September quarter, a record for that period, and more than $13 billion across about 250 listings so far this year. Other multinationals have listed Indian units recently, including Hyundai Motor India, which raised about $3.3 billion in 2024, and LG Electronics India, which raised about $1.3 billion in 2025.